AMERICA IN BLACK AND WHITE:

THE AMERICANS
REVISITED

By Alan Behr

NEW YORK, 30 DECEMBER 2009  The exhibition Looking In:
Robert Franks The Americans, now on view at The Metropolitan Museum
of Art in New York, tells the story of the making of one of the most
important photography books of the twentieth century and one of the most
consequential works produced by a modern Swiss artist. Robert Frank, born
in 1924 in Zürich to a Jewish family, moved to New York City in 1947. As
so many post-war visitors and émigrés from Europe had discovered,
New York was a fascinating place, but it was not (and is not)
representative of the United States as a nation. You can argue whether
that is because New York is either too American or not nearly American
enough, but anyone who really wants to see and understand the country
needs to step west of the Hudson River.

With recommendations from influential colleagues such as Edward
Steichen and Walker Evans, Frank secured a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Foundation Fellowship so that, in the words of his application (now in a
display case in the first gallery of the exhibition), he could "photograph
freely throughout the United States, using the miniature camera
exclusively, the making of a broad voluminous picture record of things
American, past and present." By 1954, when Frank made his application, he
already had a good reputation as a magazine photographer. As other
European photographers such as the Hungarian-born André Kertész had similarly found,
however, Franks style was somewhat alien for his new market. An
insightful photo essay of the Welsh coal miner Ben James had been rejected
as too gritty by LIFE magazine  then the leading American
journal of documentary photography.

Frank had already shown, however, that he could find brilliant images
in subjects that customarily do not yield them. One of the reasons New
York and Paris are so often the settings
for important photographs is that they are comparatively easy to
shoot. Documentary photography is nominally about places, but it is
actually about people, and New Yorkers and Parisians are not shy about
bringing their feelings and attitudes to full public view. Contrast that
with Tokyo, where, although cameras are many, a dour public disposition is
prized, and then try to recall the last time you saw a compelling
photograph of the city. Another place that is difficult to photograph for
many of the same reasons is London, but by the time he had applied for his
Guggenheim, Frank had done outstanding work there. Consider his photograph
of a banker in a double-breasted coat and a top hat, walking briskly
toward the camera as an almost dream-like street scene passes in the
background. And there is Franks disturbing but arresting image of a young
girl running down on a bleak, wet street, as if fleeing from the open rear
door of a parked hearse. You cant see London the same way after viewing
images like that.

Photographically, the American hinterlands of the 1950s were not virgin
territory but, given their size and importance, they were underrepresented
in the worlds photographic oeuvre. Walker Evans himself, along with
Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea
Lange and others had done good work there during the Depression and
later, but the dominant forms of American fine-art photography at the time
emphasized landscape and cityscape  the surroundings, not the
inhabitants. Even the best nudes (from the erotic photographs of Edward
Weston to the loving studies by Harry Callahan) and portraits (by the
great Arnold Newman) drew as
much of their power from the surroundings as from the subjects.

To foreigners such as Frank, post-war America was still an oddity. The
question on the minds of many European (and even American) intellectuals
of the time was: how could anything so big and consequential in the world
 a nuclear-tipped superpower  appear so banal and unreflective when
viewed up close? Frank, the Jewish man from the small neutral land, bought
a five-year-old Ford from a friend and, in 1955 and 1956, set off on a
series of road trips to see what was out there. He had no set itinerary,
but he drove ten thousand miles, covering the nation from north to south
and coast-to-coast.

Photography has often struggled to defend itself as an art in part
because results are so dependent on the tools. The term "miniature camera"
that Frank used in his Guggenheim application is an old name for his
primary tool: the 35mm rangefinder. A German invention, it had greatly
facilitated the expansion and refinement of the naturalistic European
style of photography. The American school was not yet convinced that
little cameras could do big things, although LIFE, despite its
middlebrow reputation, was helping to change that. Another problem in
coaxing art from photography is that the medium so quickly intrudes upon
the scene and alters it: no one looks the same when posing for a
photograph as when not. That puts a premium on stealth, but in the middle
of the Cold War, it just wasnt commonplace  or particularly advisable 
for a foreigner to slide a Leica out from under his coat (a Frank
technique) and point it at strangers in the American countryside.

When Frank was arrested, it was by an Arkansas state trooper
named Lieutenant (later Captain) R. E. Brown, on suspicion of being a
communist spy. He hadnt been shooting at the time, but there was no
mistaking that he was foreign. Frank refused to surrender his unexposed
film. A long interrogation followed during which proof of the grant from
the Guggenheim Foundation did no good. It was only after Frank convinced
Brown that he had photographed one of the stories in his rolled-up copy of
the defiantly capitalist Fortune magazine that he was
released.

(Frank could not know how fortunate he was. In an oral
history recorded in 2003, fellow trooper Ray Carnahan fondly recalled,
"Captain R. E. Brown was great guy. It is possible that he killed more men
in the line of duty than anyone else in the State Police.")

The exhibition at the Met and the hardcover version of the
thick exhibition catalogue contain a number of the contact sheets that
Frank made from 767 rolls of film. That would have produced over 27,000
negatives, which may sound like a lot, but to the machine-gunning
professional photographers of today  the latest digital equipment
permits, even encourages, the technique of ready, fire, aim  that is
rather a low output from 10,000 miles of travel. Frank had to work with
precision, and each of those 27,000 frames was a studied event. Most
Leicas of the period required that you read a handheld light meter, that
you next adjust your aperture by holding the camera at chest height as you
manipulate a dial at the front of the lens, that you focus through one
viewfinder, then verify the composition through another, take your picture
and then lower the camera to turn a knob to advance the film to the next
frame. To this day, you handle the much-upgraded rangefinder Leica in
reverse from the way you use most other cameras: you compose the picture
in your head; the last thing you do is raise the camera to record what
your minds eye has already captured. For the Swiss artist who came first
to observe, second to shoot, that was just the sequence needed.

Franks contact sheets demonstrate that he usually could
shoot no more than a couple frames per scene. One of the best photographs
in the series was taken in New Orleans (another difficult city to
photograph  not because people are reserved, but because they are so
relaxed and outwardly unperturbed, they show none of the care that the
city has famously forgot). Frank photographed a New Orleans trolley car
familiar from tourist brochures, but his image is a sonnet of unease, the
passengers, racially segregated, staring at the camera with faces of
suspicion and accusation. It is the best photograph ever taken in New
Orleans. Frank had been photographing pedestrians, looked the other way
and saw the trolley rounding Canal Street. As the contact sheet (a print
containing all the exposures made on a single roll of film) on exhibition
at the Met shows, he could only make two exposures of the trolley before
it moved on; by the time he was able to take the second shot with what,
from our perspective, was his slow-working equipment, it was already too
late.

In one of the other documents on display at the Met, Frank
talked about catching "the dream of grandeur, advertising, neon lights,
the faces of the leaders and the faces of the followers, gas tanks and
postoffices (sic), and backyards " It proved a prescient
description of what Frank had documented by the time he was through.

Frank spent nearly one year editing. He marked up his
contact sheets and made test enlargements of one thousand negatives; a
mere eighty-three photographs made it into the book. It is as if the
contact sheets were the long question about who the Americans really were
and the book was the short answer: a people more complex and troubled than
you might have known. From the contact sheets, you get the impression of
Frank as a man exploring, probing and wandering. From the photographs in
the book, you read his new comprehension of a nation grown powerful before
it had grown wise. It was a country fearful of a foreign ideology and
power (the communist menace) that it barely understood. It had populated
its countryside with signs importuning faith in God and its cities with
jukeboxes. The confident but confused national adolescence that was at the
core of the American experience at the middle of the last century  and
that remains a part of its soul to this day  has never been more
accurately portrayed.

We can hope for more photography books as subtle and
important as The Americans, but trends and economics are arrayed
against us. In one sense it has never been easier to be a documentary
photographer. Now that nearly everyone in the room brings along a camera
of some kind, whether a small digital in from a handbag or one embedded in
a mobile phone, the contemporary documentary photographer no longer
appears conspicuous. Digital shooting allows for instant preliminary
editing. But photography books have become expensive to produce and
difficult to sell. More important, we have entered an age of didacticism
in the visual arts. In photography, the result too often is that killer of
true art: obviousness. Contemporary art, with its fixation on shock and
its long and painful stumble into smug self-regard, has produced
photographs and works in other media that all too often offend their
subjects, even as they aggrandize the artists who make them. As the
contact sheets of Robert Frank show, he didnt merely edit away images
that had the sweetened scent of popular magazines; he did the same for
images that, by their harshness, were conversely just as obvious. The kind
of brooding but at times lyrical and under all circumstances measured
response taken by The Americans plays on a kind of subtlety, wit
and insight that reminds us that the one thing photography  that most
literal of media  must always be is honest. But as anyone who has ever
been a bit too direct with a friend about his or her choice of a lover has
discovered, honesty can get you into trouble, which may explain what
happened to Franks book:

It was first published in Paris in 1958 as Les
Américains and appeared the next year in the United States. Despite
the bonus of an introduction by Jack Kerouac, the book struggled through
an initial period of indifference and some open hostility that, in todays
market, might have got it remaindered and then forgotten. But genius will
often win out, and in the troubled 1960s, the book found an audience
willing to accept the often disquieting but always true message that it
had offered one decade too early. Since then, the book has been recognized
for the masterpiece that it is.

The exhibition at the Metropolitan, which includes all the
photographs from the book, arranged in sequence, follows previous showings
at the National Gallery in Washington and the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art. Robert Frank, who has become an American citizen, will turn
eighty-five while it is still running. The best thing that an artist can
do to understand his place in art history is live a long life.